Monday, September 14, 2009

Julie and Julia

Once again to the cinema, and this time it's six couples who come together to watch "Julie and Julia". The 6 p.m. performance on a Sunday evening is perhaps not a fair comparison though with last Friday's later performance of "Coco before Chanel", when we shared the cinema with only three other couples.

The reviews for this cookery-centric film have been uniformly good, with Meryl Streep in the role of Julia Child particularly lauded. Julia Child is credited with introducing French Cordon Bleu cuisine to an American audience and then featuring in an apparently legendary TV cookery programme. On this side of the Atlantic no-one has ever heard of her.

On the plus side, Streep certainly gets into the role of the larger than life (in many senses) diplomat's wife in fifties France. On the down side, the character is a bit of a pantomime dame, all wobbling, shrieking and hollering with a fixed grin on her face. Not a pretty sight (except in the eyes of her shorter, balding, minor bureaucrat husband). But who knows, maybe that was the real Julia?

Julie is much more recognisable as the 29 year old feisty blogger, failed writer and call centre worker, who lives with her husband above a Pizza shop in noisy Queens, NY. She blogs about her self-imposed task of cooking all of Julia Child's 524 recipes in a year, thus learning to cook. It's as difficult as it sounds but she's an attractive sight so that's all right then.

It's good, but not as good as the reviews say. Of the films we saw in the last week, Clare has the order (best to worst): 1. District 9 2. Coco before Chanel 3. Julie and Julia.